Eliza Robbins Crafts didn’t let it keep her down. She had learned to stand on her own early, deciding at age 14 that she wanted to be a teacher and carving out a career for herself.

Her first husband, Ellison Robbins, was also an educator. Together they took over the San Bernardino school system — two adjoining adobe buildings on Fourth Street between Arrowhead Avenue and D Street — in 1858, just seven years after the first Mormon settlers established the city. He taught the upper grades and was superintendent, while she taught the elementary students.

Six years later, Ellison died of pneumonia. Eliza’s daughter, Rosabelle, was just 3.

In his 1902 “Historical and Biographical Record of Southern California,” James Guinn wrote that Eliza “picked up the work her husband had laid down, completing the school year interrupted by his death.”

A year after Ellison died, Eliza married Myron Crafts. The two had been friends for years, connected through the Congregational Church they had both worked to establish. The couple spent two decades together before Myron Crafts died in 1886, also of pneumonia.

Had he lived a little longer, the Pomona Colleges might be located in a very different place than they are today. A promoter of the fledgling institution, Crafts had donated 40 acres of land in Crafton Hills for the college.

“Had he lived,” Guinn wrote, “the college would have been located there.”

Myron Crafts was one of the first in the region to plant navel oranges, starting a crop in 1870. His ranch near Yucaipa became a resort/sanitarium for friends, and before long he established a formal hotel called Crafton Retreat.

Eliza tried to keep the place running after Myron’s death, but it was overwhelming. She sold the property and moved in with Rosabelle, herself a widow, in Redlands.

In her later years, Eliza wrote “Pioneer Days in the San Bernardino Valley,” a history/memoir. In it, she recounts a number of interesting stories, including the great flood of 1867/1868.

That flood stranded Eliza on her property for several days as the rising waters made the roads impassable.

It was her family’s habit, she wrote, to travel to San Bernardino each Sunday morning for Sunday school and church. They would picnic on the way home under a large sycamore tree.

But on the Sunday before Christmas that year, the skies were dark. Myron and his son Harry went to church alone, planning to stay overnight in San Bernardino. By the evening, Eliza knew they would not be coming home for some time. It rained hard through the afternoon and through a “lonely, fearful night.”

Monday morning made it clear that “the Santa Ana River would be impassable for several days as there were no bridges,” she wrote. “I could hear it roaring like the ocean.

“Mill Creek came rushing and foaming across the plain, carrying everything in its path; even immense boulders went tumbling along like playthings.”

It was a full week before Myron was able to reach home again, “by swimming two streams, one of which was a road changed into a river.”

In an account of what seems to have been an episode of Santa Ana winds just below Lytle Creek in 1852, she describes how the “box” of a wagon completely lifted off the running gear and fell to the ground. A mother and her children inside the wagon were tumbled into a heap, and the family’s provisions “went in every direction.”

No one was injured, but considering how often big-rig trucks are blown over in the same region by the Santa Anas, it points out how some things haven’t changed in the past century and a half.

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